Salvador Dalí was born on May 11th, in 1904 in Spain. From an early age, Dalí was encouraged to practice his art and would eventually go on to study at an academy in Madrid. In the 1920s, he went to Paris and began interacting with artists such as Picasso and Miro, which led to Dalí’s first Surrealist phase. At an early age, Salvador was producing highly sophisticated drawings.  All of this experimentation led to Dalí’s first Surrealistic period in 1929. These oil paintings were small collages of his dream images. He is perhaps best known for his 1931 painting The Persistence of Memory, showing melting clocks in a landscape setting. His work employed a meticulous classical technique, influenced by Renaissance artists, that contradicted the “unreal dream” space that he created with strange hallucinatory characters. By the mid-1930s, Salvador Dalí had become as notorious for his colorful personality and his artwork.